


A Different Kind of Time

by thecarlysutra



Category: Salton Sea (2002)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-24
Updated: 2010-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-14 00:58:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/143602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thecarlysutra/pseuds/thecarlysutra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>History puts a saint in every dream.  For Holly, who wanted to know about Jimmy getting his tattoo.  (SPOILERS: Glancing, non-explicit reference to underage, dubious consent sex.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Different Kind of Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [myhappyface](https://archiveofourown.org/users/myhappyface/gifts).



  
10 years.

Jimmy’s mom was a real nice lady, but she’d had a bad life, and that meant she had problems, and that was why they had to put Jimmy in foster care. Jimmy tried to tell them that there wouldn’t be anyone to take care of her if they took him away, but he was ten and no one listened to you at that age, no matter what you had to say.

12 years.

Jimmy was never real smart, anyway, but moving around and having to meet all these different people and everything just made school harder. Plus he got picked on, because he was small and his clothes were always old and not always clean, and so when he was twelve he just stopped going. Mostly the foster people didn’t notice or care, but when they shouted him and the other kids out of the house, goddamn you fucking kids this is like living in a zoo I can’t even hear myself think, Jimmy would go out in the city. He was good at keeping himself busy, his mom had always said that. You can keep yourself entertained, can’t you sugar, while me and my friend go in the other room? Turn the TV on real loud now, that’s a good boy.

Jimmy was good at understanding directions—he could always find his way home—and he could walk forever, so he would go out into the city and find interesting things to look at. He would go down to the beach and look at the birds haunting the surf, and the silvery flat bodies of the fish washed up on the shore. Sometimes he would visit the little skeletons of buildings and the abandoned campers shipwrecked in the gray sand. If they were empty, they could be his own little cave for a while, and if they weren’t, he could run fast. Sometimes he would walk all the way to his mom’s house, and stand across the street watching to see if he could see her. But he never did, and then one time he saw another woman go in there, opening the door with keys, and after that he didn’t come back, and he forgot how to get there, because it wasn’t home anymore so why remember it?

14 years.

Jimmy was fourteen when he first did meth. He had smoked things before, cigarettes and bitter junk marijuana, and he liked the way that smoking filled up your whole lungs with sensation, so you could really feel yourself breathing and knew you were alive. Of course, if you weren’t alive, well, you’d be dead, and not smoking at all, but somehow most of the time it was really hard to feel it.

He showed one of the foster boys a good cave he’d found, a deserted camper that still had a sofa in it. It was Jimmy’s favorite, and for weeks he had been going there alone and curling up on the couch and falling asleep listening to the whisper of the tides outside the rusty fuselage. And this boy was older than Jimmy but he was always nice to him, and hardly anyone was nice to him, so one day Jimmy took him down to the beach and took him inside his cave. And the boy laughed and sank into the soft cushions of Jimmy’s couch, and he took something out of his pocket and asked Jimmy if he had ever flown before. And at first Jimmy thought he was talking about airplanes, but he took the pipe, warm with fire and tasting like the boy’s mouth—cinnamon gum and ashes—and he breathed in deep. The smoke filled up his lungs like he liked so he could feel his breathing, and then his head exploded. When Jimmy could blink back the blinding white, like a cartoon character reeling from a punch, his heart was beating so hard and so fast that all his pressure points were throbbing, and the boy was kissing him and pulling down his pants. Jimmy closed his eyes, and he laid back and rode the roller coaster of his new mind.

5 minutes.

Jimmy first met Danny at a party. Kujo was celebrating getting out of rehab again, and one of the girls brought this guy Jimmy had never seen before. And he stuck out, not just because Jimmy had never seen him before; even though they mostly tended to stay within their group, people drifted in and out all the time. He stuck out because Danny was different. Most of the tweekers were constant movement: they moved all the time, and they talked all the time, and even when they were sitting still, their hands were shaking and their mouths were mumbling or they were gnashing their teeth, or something. Danny could be real still. Danny was always real still; he moved—or sometimes didn’t move, that was kind of the point—like he inhabited a different kind of time from everyone else. And Jimmy was pretty flaky, and sometimes he had difficulty following or understanding, but even he thought that it was hard for the other tweekers to focus. You would be talking, and you’d think they were listening, but the next second they just stared at you like they’d never seen you before. But Danny wasn’t like that. When you spoke, you could tell he was listening. He was always listening, and he was always watching; Danny took in everything.

Jimmy watched Danny for a while, the riot of the party between them. At first he thought, because the girl had brought him, that Danny was with her, but it didn’t take long to see that that wasn’t true. The girl would touch Danny, her hands resting on his arm, his hip, but Danny didn’t lean into any of the touches, and if she got too close, like when she laughed and put her hand on his chest like an accident, Danny looked away. He was nice to her, though, and he took a shotgun off her, but that didn’t mean anything.

He had really sad eyes, but eyes that saw everything, and Jimmy could tell even from across the room that Danny was really paying attention, that he could really listen, and Jimmy thought it would be good to know someone like that. When the girl went off somewhere with some of the other girls, moving in flocks like girls did, Jimmy wove through the crush of bodies to cross the room. He sat down on the couch next to Danny. His sad eyes were pale up close, light blue, and Jimmy was surprised; probably because Danny had eyeliner on, or maybe because it was so dark in here—or maybe because they were so sad, so intent—from far away, Jimmy had thought Danny’s eyes were dark.

“I’m Jimmy. Jimmy the Finn.”

Danny smiled a little, and real slow, like his mouth needed practice first.

“Danny,” he said, his voice soft and low, his diction clear and slow.

Jimmy was surprised again; Danny was a real big guy, so Jimmy had expected him to sound kind of mean, you know, tough, and all the tweekers spoke so fast you couldn’t figure out where they stopped to breathe. It was weird, but really cool, like Danny lived in a different kind of time.

“Not Danny the anything, though,” Danny said.

“It’s a joke,” Jimmy said. “They were kind of making fun of me, but I thought it sounded cool, so I let them. They call me that because—well, Kujo was reading this weird book about a dragon and some kind of funny wolf, and—well, he found it on the bus, but he thought it was cool. It had swordfights and stuff. And there was a guy called Finn, only I guess it’s like in Mexico where all the names actually mean something, because ‘Finn’ used to mean, like, ‘blonde,’ and I’m not really blonde, but—”

“‘Fair,’” Danny said. “It meant ‘fair.’”

Jimmy frowned. “That doesn’t make any sense . . .”

Danny studied him for a moment, his pale eyes crossing Jimmy’s face.

“‘Fair’ like ‘pale in color,’” he said finally. “Not like the opposite of ‘unfair.’”

Jimmy laughed. “Okay, cool. I get it.”

Danny smiled again, his weird small smile, like he had forgotten how. The sleeves of his shirt were cut off; his arms were bare, showing off his large tattoos. That was really cool. Brave. Jimmy had always thought tattoos were cool, and he had gone into the shops to get one more than once, and chickened out every time. He wasn’t one of those weirdoes who was afraid of blood, or needles; he was afraid of pain, like everyone was.

“Those are really cool,” Jimmy said. “I like your flames best.”

Danny looked down at the flames burning down his arm like he had forgotten they were there.

“Thanks.”

“How bad did it hurt?”

Danny shrugged. “Not as bad as some things.”

Danny lowered his eyes, and Jimmy was afraid he had done something wrong, something to hurt Danny’s feelings. Well, there was always a way to fix that. Jimmy took his pipe out.

“Want a hit?” he said. And then, because he really liked Danny, and he wanted to be near him and to breathe his same breath more than he was afraid of looking foolish, he said, “Shotgun?”

Danny just looked at him for a long moment. In regular tweeker time, that would have definitely been not just a no but a hell no, but Danny didn’t work that way, and finally he nodded. His eyes stayed on Jimmy, and he smiled his weird smile again.

“Okay.”

Jimmy lit the pipe, and he filled his lungs with smoke. He held his pipe in one hand, and the other he set on Danny’s shoulder—it was just the same heat as the pipe burning in his other palm. Jimmy leaned forward, using his hand on Danny’s shoulder for leverage, and he breathed his dragon’s breath into Danny’s mouth. Just like with the girl, Danny didn’t lean into his touch, but that was okay. Jimmy could feel Danny inhale deep, could feel Danny’s lungs expanding with the breath Jimmy had given him. They breathed the same air.

0 hour.

Jimmy felt proud, prouder than he ever had in his whole life. Danny was bringing him in on a score, a big score. They were going to be so rich, but what mattered more was that Danny was trusting him to help him; no one ever trusted him for anything serious—Kujo and his ridiculous plans didn’t count, since they never got out of anything but Kujo’s mouth—and it was Danny trusting him, Danny who was so smart and cool and different. And Jimmy was so proud, and what he wanted more than he had ever wanted anything was to not fuck it up. The money was going to be awesome, and they could buy so much gack they wouldn’t have to bum for weeks, but more important was making Danny proud of him. He’d never made anyone proud of him before.

Jimmy was not going to fuck it up. He was going to be brave. Kujo had read in that weird wolf book—or maybe Jimmy had seen it in _Last of the Mohicans_ , which he’d seen on TNT three times during one long night at Kujo’s, they just kept playing the movie over and over again until it had become the rhythm of life—that tattoos were for warriors. They showed you were brave.

Jimmy was going to be brave, and the first brave thing he was going to do was get a tattoo, to show Danny he wasn’t afraid of the pain. He wasn’t afraid of anything; he was going to be brave, and he was going to make Danny proud.  



End file.
